Past exhibitions

In the exhibition Reinterpreting the Frame, new artworks are shown together with their inspirational origins. The roots of these works by five young Finnish artists go back to old archival images from the Museum’s collections.

A photographic artist, researcher, photojournalist, teacher, and developer of artistic research – the extensive influence of Leena Saraste (born 1942) on Finnish photography cannot be overstated.

The first exhibition of the festival of political photography (PVF) will present series from seven photographers from around the world who all want to make statements about social issues they find important. Most of the series are being shown in Finland for the first time.

Family Album features a series of family portraits with children from divorced families. The main character of each photograph is a child whose parents have divorced. The children have invited everyone they feel belongs to their family to join in the portrait. They have also arranged the family members as they have seen fit.

The series In the Playroom brutally shows that it is hard to build a protective bubble around children. Hobin's works often deal with the darker aspects of childhood and incorporate references to cinema, history or popular culture. Children act out September 11 and re-enact the Abu-Ghraib torture scene, as publicised by the media. A little girl, wearing a plastic tiara, sits, with knees bleeding, in front of a boy, dressed as a reporter.

The Internet has fundamentally changed photography. Never in history have people created so many photographs to such vast and immediate audiences as today. Never before has the individual snapshot taken by ordinary men and women had such global political impacts. Photographs have become integral in…

Everyday routines, what are they? Clipping our nails, brushing our teeth, and eating are things we constantly do, but seldom think about.

Arttu Merimaa discusses the relationship between artistic actions and objects and the artist. In a video essay, which verges on the documentary, Merimaa remakes a clay sculpture that he made as a child but that was later lost. The artist tries to recreate the sculpture, which depicts a cave, to…

‘Ecological fallacy’ is a statistical term that is defined simply as an error in reasoning. Hence the title of the exhibition refers to an error or a mistaken assumption in the interpretation of statistical data. The artworks in this biennial investigate analogous errors and assumptions made by the ruling powers of the world – governments, corporations, banks – while challenging our own fallacies and the forces that violate the ecological balance of the earth.

Objects on Oil brings to the fore the fossil basis of human experience, economic activity, and industrialised societies more widely, and the breaks in our understanding related to this material foundation.

The exhibition Tavoittamattomien hetkien häivähdyksiä ('Glimpses of the Unattainable') is based on materials donated to the Finnish Museum of Photography by an amateur photographer. A joint effort between the curator Mirjami Schuppert and two artists, Hertta Kiiski and Niina Vatanen, the exhibition explores the photographic archive as something that generates multiple meanings and that is a continuous and plentiful source of inspiration.

​Golden Age 6 tells small stories and lets the viewer visit images that mostly speak of something entirely different than what they were intended to record.

The die-cut scraps from our childhood come to life in Karoliina Paappa's exhibition Tyttö ja tiikeri (The Girl and the Tiger).

In the Beginning There Was Everything is Tuija Lindström's (born 1950) first comprehensive retrospective to be held in Finland. The themes of beauty and death, and life and humanity, are at the heart of the works presented at the exhibition. Lindström is one of Sweden's most well-known…

The photographs of the French artist Smith (born 1985) explore the themes of absence and presence, as they paint a picture of the constant changes a young person undergoes. This major solo exhibition is Smith's debut in the Nordic countries. Still in her late twenties, Paris-based Smith was brought…

In the installation A Game of Cards a character is playing cards with his tormentor. A sense of horror and strangeness is part of the world of Juhana Moisander's work. " In my works, I am building a dark space where history, memory and fantasy meet. According to the traditional definition, horror…

The Surreal Illusionism features nearly 500 photographic postcards that offer a surprising wealth of pictorial ideas, high artistic quality and photographic allure. Surreal fantasies, mysterious dreams, role-play, glamorous divas and irony are running wild in the postcards. All these will transport…

Family Portrait deals with finding a partner and starting a family, by focusing on the physical side of things, as well as the emotions and hidden connotations involved. Approaching it on a personal level, the series comes face to face with the forbidden emotions of being a mother and the …

​Nine Nameless Mountains, a work about a trip to the north, is a playful reinterpretation of the road trip genre of photography. It is a poetic and absurd study that uses geographical observations to explore distance and scale, whilst being a celebration of friendship, photography and chance.

What are the things that make everyday life good? A series of documentary photographs by Julius Koivistoinen (born 1990) of daily life of various Helsinki residents links the people and their surroundings in a cinematic manner.

​Finglish is a photographic documentary about Finnish Americans and Finnish Canadians. It plainly reveals the dreams, utopias and homesickness of the immigrants, and documents their Finnish-flavoured American life.

What is it like to be a photographer, when everyone is a photographer? Summer School is an opportunity to see what photography and the world as processed through photographs look like right now. The exhibition is a comprehensive overview of works by today's photography students.

Eleven photographers went to look for Finland. They discovered children's nature trips, national diseases, Russians in Lappeenranta, a man shut away in a room, a national landscape, Chechen refugees, Johanna Tukiainen, death, home, peacekeepers and Santa Claus. A number of different subjects form a…

In his new works, the visual artist Tuomo Rainio explores the relationship between image and space. Rainio's works use as materials direct photographs, video, and computer programs of his own devising, as he discusses how insights gained in the bit-based space of digital photography can be captured…

The eventful journey of Finnish photography into an art form will be outlined in the first exhibition of the Finnish Museum of Photography in spring 2013. The exhibition is based on a significant private collection that was donated to the Finnish Museum of Photography in 2012 by Erja Hannula and…

The photographic artist Nelli Palomäki (born 1981) has, in recent years, made a breakthrough both in Finland and internationally with her classically beautiful and magically moving portraits. The pieces to be exhibited include both the audience favourites and new intimate and delicate works.

Eeva-Mari Haikala's works explore the terrain between performance, video art, and photography. The exhibition Elle se sentait profondément honteuse is, indeed, an attempt to give an answer to the question of when a work is to be seen as performance art and when it is a work of photography or video…

Maamme (Our Land) is a video work in which non-native Finnish citizens sing Maamme, the national anthem of Finland.

The exhibition Picturing Death asks whether photographs have a role to play in our encounter with death. Photographs will be presented by Pekka Elomaa, Arvi Hanste, Ulla Jokisalo, Ben Kaila, Andrei Lajunen, Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Hans Pauli, Pentti Sammallahti and Seppo Saves.

Instantaneous mood pictures from a legendary collection: self-portraits, still lifes, conceptual art and collages. The exhibition includes Polaroids by big international names ranging from Ansel Adams to Andy Warhol, plus a selection of Finnish Polaroid images. Common features are playful snapshot…

The artist Tanja Koponen (b. 1968) will create an installation In This Room in the Project Space at the Finnish Museum of Photography. In This Room is about the impossibility of photography. Koponen asks whether anything that exists in reality can be caught in a photograph as it is right now, or as…

The Boy Scouts in the picture symbolizes the boy, who early in life is shaped in roles that are difficult to break out of, for example, gender roles and career choices. In the artist Ann Eringstam’s series ”Escape to Reality”, the scouts try to move from an artificial world into an alternate…